One of the most widely acclaimed books on modernity, Berman’s kaleidoscopic journey on modernization through the vicissitudes that transformed the lives of millions, oddly seems a familiar story today.
” All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face… the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men.”
These words borrowed by Berman from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto lays the basis for his concept, that, human is the fundamental of any idea and hence modernism should be about a man’s everyday life. He also focuses on the necessity to understand the terms modernity, modernism and modernization distinctly and vividly. He argues that socio-economic modernization in a practical sense is not compatible with the artistic modernist movement. Despite this, he adds, literature has had a great impact on our understanding of what modernity is, and how it functions.
It is fascinating to see the parallels Berman draws between art, architecture and literature to explore the dialectics of modernity. His focus on the experience of modernity through an investigation of Goeth’s Faust, Dostoevsky’s St. Petersberg, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Haussman’s and Baudelaire’s Paris and Robert Moses’s New York is intelligible, yet exhaustive. It is interesting to see, for instance, how he regards communism in itself as a fleeting moment, considering the dynamicity of modernity or his usage of Goethe’s Faust (as Faust offers his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures) as an allegory for the state of modernity as increasingly experienced by humans today.
“The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal’s heart).”
― Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works
However, there are also certain nuances within the book which I find to be at variance in today’s time. One among them will be Berman’s perspective on modernity’s evolution as a purely western world phenomenon. It made me wonder, what constitutes modernity to include only the west? What about its repercussions in the European colonies that acted as their supply base for resources and labor? Here comes the incongruity in the very definition of the term ‘modern’. Can industrial and technological developments solely categorize a place as modern? What if culture and knowledge were also included? What about the place of women, let alone, the place of a black man in the modern world?
All these questions apart, the book is a great read for anyone looking for a comprehensive multifaceted take on the experience of modernity. Berman’s style which is more allegorical than scientific makes his writing seem like an extension of that of Goethe and manages to keep one glued to the pages. This also appears to be suitable for communicating ideas with a wide variety of people as already demonstrated by writers such as Orwell and Shakespeare. It would not have made the emotional impact that his writing captures and would have limited itself to a few dimensions if he had gone for a dry scientific text. After all, Berman states:
“Our society will never be able to control its eruptive “powers of the underworld” if it pretends that its scientists are the only ones out of control. One of the basic facts of modern life is that we are all “long-haired” boys today.”
Cloud of Thoughts 